First an electronic pitch pipe, then a traditional reed pitch pipe. Finally I understand why the electronic pitch pipe sounds so hollow, and why it is so much harder to get my pitch from it: It's missing half of the harmonics!

Here is a quick clip of me doing some throat singing. I sing an "oo" vowel at about 165 Hz (E below middle C), visible as the red bar along the bottom, then transition to a shape that emphasizes the eighth overtone of that fundamental, 8*165 Hz = 1320 Hz. So that's three octaves (2^3 = 8) higher, the E two above middle C, just out of my falsetto singing range. I then go up the harmonics, which you can see as steps of 165 Hz in the spectrogram, up to 1980 Hz (a high B), far outside my singing range.

I heard a piece of music last night, "Variations for the Healing of Arinushka" by one of my favorite composers, Arvo Pärt, on the local (but not really local anymore) classical radio station WILL FM 90.9. I noted down the title before falling asleep.

Apple has just updated their terms of service. To download and install a new app, you must agree to the terms of service for the App Store. Apple provides a convenient way for you to read the ToS in the form of a little book reader. Lucky for us, because the terms are over seventy pages long. It took me three or four minutes just to flip through them without reading them, though admittedly I got distracted a few times.

When ING's savings interest rates started plummeting, the graph of the rate over the last several months mysteriously disappeared from the website. I contacted customer support but got nothing useful in reply. So I organized a collection of the data I had kept since September 2007. Here is a chart and data series of ING's savings interest rate.

If anyone knows how to get Google Spreadsheets to graph date-series data in a useful way, please let me know.